The State Police kept secret an evidence-handling scandal that erupted in 2011 at the Hawthorne barracks in which drugs and other evidence were lost, leading to botched prosecutions, the retirement of two senior investigators and the forced resignation of a trooper accused of lying to internal affairs investigators.

The only person arrested in the investigation was a nurse who is married to a former senior investigator.

She was implicated for forging dozens of prescriptions for painkillers as her husband, who abruptly retired, was a target in the theft of similar drugs from an evidence locker.

A Times Union examination of the case found significant amounts of evidence, including cocaine, marijuana and prescription painkillers, were lost or stolen. The review also shows that State Police supervisors were never punished, and actually promoted, despite allowing years of severe mismanagement at the Troop K barracks.

The missing evidence triggered an intensive two-year internal investigation that began in the summer of 2011 and prompted the State Police to rescind arrest warrants and, in a smattering of cases, to privately urge the Westchester County district attorney's office to vacate prosecutions.

State Police spokeswoman Darcy Wells said Monday there were two cases at the Hawthorne barracks in 2011 where evidence "was not properly accounted for." One involved 98 missing Oxycodone pills; Wells would not say what the second case was. An internal investigation and audits were launched.

"A thorough internal investigation was conducted and full disclosure was made by the State Police to the appropriate authorities," Wells said in a written statement. "Our audits are designed to identify weaknesses in the system and correct them. In this particular case the audit did exactly that. Any issues that were identified during this investigation were discovered internally by the State Police. They were immediately made the subject of an internal investigation and corrective steps were taken."

New York State Police logo(Photo: State police logo)

Wells would not discuss what the corrective steps were. She would not address other issues raised by copies of the audits and other internal documents obtained by the Times Union.

In January, the State Police refused to disclose any records on their internal investigation of Troop K, which has jurisdiction from Westchester to Columbia counties, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request filed last summer by the Times Union. In February, following an appeal by the newspaper, the agency still withheld numerous documents and released only a heavily redacted audit of the troubled Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Hawthorne.

Court records and internal State Police documents obtained from confidential sources, including a second audit that the State Police did not acknowledge even existed, indicate the investigation never determined who was responsible for the missing evidence, including nearly five ounces of cocaine. The Times Union also obtained a complete copy of the audit that State Police heavily redacted before releasing it under an appeal by the newspaper.

The information blacked out by the agency includes a full-page summary of the audit that laid blame on a former State Police senior investigator, Robert C. Bennett, who filed for an early retirement at age 42 when the scandal erupted three years ago. "In far too many cases, errors should have been detected and corrected at this level," the audit states. "Former Senior Investigator Bennett was allowed to ignore his supervisory responsibilities and to actively mismanage his operation at SP Hawthorne. ... This led to ... backlogs of evidence at the station and troop level."

Bennett, now 45, declined to comment for this story. An internal affairs summary from March 2012 said Bennett was "a target in the missing evidence case" involving the 98 Oxycodone pills. It was the discovery of that missing evidence that triggered the broader internal investigation.

Bennett's wife, Erin, 42, a licensed practical nurse, was arrested in September 2011 and charged in Poughkeepsie Town Court with two felonies for forging prescriptions for painkillers. She later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor forgery charge; last year her conviction was reduced to a charge of disorderly conduct, according to her attorney.

Dutchess County prosecutors declined to discuss Erin Bennett's case. The state Education Department, which regulates nurses, filed no disciplinary action and also declined comment.

Glen Plotsky, an Orange County attorney who represented Erin Bennett in the criminal case, said prosecutors told her she could have faced 75 felony counts of forgery because of the high number of prescriptions involved. Still, Erin Bennett, who had no documented history of drug abuse, was the only person to face criminal charges from the fallout of a wide-reaching internal State Police investigation into missing evidence.

"From my point of view they tried really hard to try to pin the end result — missing cases — on someone and, ultimately, I don't believe that they were able to come up with any evidence or at least not sufficient evidence to result in criminal charges against anybody directly involved in law enforcement," said Plotsky, who also represented several investigators during the internal probe.

Matthew J. Laspisa, a senior investigator who was assigned to the Hawthorne barracks in August 2011, as the missing-evidence case began, described the station as being "in a total state of disarray" in an internal memo obtained by the Times Union.

"Case folders were scattered about the Senior's office, some were thrown in no specific order in various file cabinets, and case files for the entire 2008 year were stacked in random order on a table top in the southeast corner of the squad room," Laspisa wrote in an April 2012 memo to an internal affairs staff inspector, Mark Smith.

Two former State Police members who faced disciplinary charges in the case, Trooper Seamus A. Lyons — no relation to the reporter for this article — and Senior Investigator Noel N.J. Nelson, have filed complaints with the state Division of Human Rights alleging they were the scapegoats in a larger scandal. Lyons also has filed a petition in state Supreme Court in Albany seeking back pay and reinstatement to his job. Records in his case indicate he was forced to resign last year when a State Police supervisor handed him a three-page termination letter signed by Superintendent Joseph D'Amico, telling him to resign or be fired.

Neither Lyons nor Nelson worked at the Hawthorne station. The disciplinary charges filed against them accused them of lying to internal affairs investigators about their delivery of cocaine and marijuana evidence from a laboratory to an evidence locker at the Hawthorne barracks in 2011.

State Police officials said there were no electronic records to support the troopers' claim that they brought the drugs to the station and left them in an open evidence locker in the presence of multiple BCI investigators.

Terrence P. Dwyer, a Poughkeepsie attorney who represents Lyons in his court case and Nelson in his human rights complaint, said neither was accused of taking the evidence, which was never found.

Dwyer said his clients "were expendable to the State Police and I certainly felt that the State Police viewed them as being disposable items to cover the scandal."

"They've got missing drugs out of there ... they've got missing guns," Dwyer continued. "They've been scrambling after the last two years. Their own audit showed at any one point in time two percent of the evidence was missing."

Wells, the State Police spokeswoman, said no weapons were unaccounted for.